A born defective camera.

“A born defective camera.”

written by Karkada on 07/07/2020

I bought an Olympus FE-170(made in China) in Feb.2007 from GK Vale, Bangalore for a supposed to be discounted price of Rs:10,000/= with supposed to be "free" charger, four NiMH rechargeable batteries and one proprietary XD memory card of 512MB. It is lying unused/unusable eversince for the following reasons:
1) The designer's and manufacturer's dummies forgot to incorporate "type of battery" option.
(Alkaline, NiMH, etc) in the software, motherboard design and in Settings.
2) The battery contact design at top and bottom of battery case is awfully defective.
3) The important provision of "Date Imprint" is not there.
4) Strange proprietary card continued when other manufacturers had moved to standard SD cards.

The above are in addition to bad non-bright light performance and other flaws pointed out by author of above article and many other buyers. The manufacturer had obviously produced a huge number of this born-defective product and wanted to sell it off in time for release of his next model. The sellers probably received a fat commission for somehow exhausting the stocks and keeping their mouth shut about the defects.

The "free" Hitachi charger(made in China) I got did not last more than an year. The "free" batteries were already more than two years old in storage. Not that other budget cameras are very great but this one is surely among the worst.